Ascending out an S.O.S.

Sometimes, a movie comes along that is so well done it puts everything else in the shade. For directors, scriptwriters and actors alike it’s that Holy Grail; the movie that defines their career and either ensures their legacy or sets them on the path to greatness. It can however be a double-edged blade; what if you peak too early and never come close to re-capturing that glory? What if your career is defined by the endless and ultimately fruitless endeavour of producing that second slice of fried gold?

The Matrix is one of those movies. When it landed on cinema screens in 1999, it had almost millisecond perfect timing. The turn of the millennium, the rampant techno-drama that was Y2K (remember that? When everyone genuinely thought the world was doomed because Windows Calendars may or may not have been able to handle the 2 at the beginning of the year counter. Clearly, 17 years ago we were mostly idiots. La plus ça change, huh?) It’s a fairly simple hero story, granted and Keanu Reeves, lord bless him, does a fantastic impression of a six foot lump of timber throughout, but somehow it all pulls together and works a treat. Agent Smith is actually a really decent foil and pretty good bad guy until he starts yammering on about the smell of humanity, which considering he’s the embodiment of  a computer programme within a completely virtual world and has exactly no need whatsoever for olfactory organs, if he even has them, he’s basically chatting shit at that stage. I know what you’re probably thinking and no, we don’t talk about the sequels. I don’t know what everything went a weird shade of green and I’m pretty convinced even the Wachowski Siblings have no clue what the characters were babbling about for most of it. The fella who plays Agent Smith when he possesses an actual human does a pretty sharp Hugo Weaving impression though, so props to that guy. What it did do though is basically make The Wachowskis a pair of household names, even if those names have both since changed.

Sadly I think that’s where the afore-mentioned double-edged blade comes in. If you look at their output since The Matrix, it’s not exactly been swathed in glory. Speed Racer was effectively the cinematic equivalent of what would happen if you could force-feed your eyeballs neon candy floss then take them on a roller coaster for three hours straight. Vertigo-induced eye-vomit imported directly from Japan. Cloud Atlas was well received by some but by all accounts was fairly bloated and a bit convoluted. What’s really stuck the knife into their legacy and given it a good old twist was Jupiter Ascending.

Sci Fi can be an unforgiving mistress. You either have to go full on, balls-to-the-wall weird (I’m looking at you here Predestination, you crazy bastard) or you try and make it relatable and realistic. Trouble is you can easily fall between those two extremes where it’s too weird to be believable, but not believable enough to be effective. Often things just end up being dumb, which is sadly where Jupiter Ascending comes in and it asks a few worrying questions about The Wachowskis’ writing. The plot falls somewhere between The Matrix, Harry Potter and Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is an odd mix to start with; it’s all chosen ones and evil plots to destroy the Earth by a Galactic Empire we know nothing about by way of the obligatory double cross and heroic defiance and sacrifice. It’s almost like when they wrote the script, they just could get past the whole “ordinary person discovers they’re a huge deal in a universe they had no knowledge of and then stuff happens” so they just added 8 million effects shots and some really ropey prosthetics.

Jupiter herself is a toilet-cleaning slacker/genetic reincarnation of a long dead galactic queen (because of course she is) whose children are squabbling over who owns the Earth and therefore who can harvest its inhabitants for their precious genes. So one of them hires a rogue man/dog hybrid to find her on Earth and shenanigans play out in inevitable fashion from there. My brain almost shut off completely when Caine the Dog-Faced Boy (Caine? Canine? Geddit? Yeah they went there) fires his gun and it genuinely sounds like a lapdog barking. One of those annoying little rat-in-a-wig type ankle-biting dickhead dogs that for some obscure reason old people seem to think are adorable. All the technology is described away because we’re not advanced enough to understand it except bees who are apparently genetically programmed to recognise royalty and defend it from marauding space pirates. Bees. Sigh.

Sean Bean’s grizzled Yorkshire accent appears in the middle of L.A. because he’s also a weird alien, but fair play to him because he actually makes it through the entire film without being riddled with bullets, arrows or any other form of ballistic projectile. He’s a massive douchebag for a couple of other reasons, not least because he seems singularly unbothered that his own daughter is still on the planet at a time when the bad guys are planning to harvest it. He does rock quite the triple-cross though, because if in doubt have someone be evil/not evil/evil or some similar combination. I’m still trying to work out how his accent fits into all of this, partially because weird voices seem to be the order of the day. Eddie Redmayne seems to have forsaken all usual acting routes in lieu of channelling Voldemort and/or playing it like he’s smoked about forty Benson & Hedges a day since he was 12. He makes all the classic Evil Overlord cliché mistakes: surrounding himself with idiots, kidnapping the heroine’s loved ones and giving her a fiendish ultimatum, having a plan so convoluted only Christopher Nolan might top it; the whole nine yards. He is however, spectacularly forgettable other than his distinctive wheeze and that isn’t exactly a good memory. If your defining feature as a villain is sounding like your lungs have been replaced by vintage sandbags from World War I filled with a mixture of fine-grain aquarium sand and cancer, you’re going to have a bad time. Jupiter, while ostensibly our heroine is basically just a damsel in distress. Giant leap forward for gender equality that, especially when you consider the directors have both transitioned from male to female in recent years. She’s basically saved by everyone (including the bees) from a variety of stereotypes before eventually learning her place in the universe and going back to cleaning toilets by day and zipping around with her literal guardian angel (who she falls head over heels for after about two minutes obviously) who finally got his wings back. Ellen Ripley, she is not.

Genuinely, this film is absolutely in the top five Dumbest Sci Fi Masquerading as High Concept I’ve seen. Special mention to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it crop circle reference, the frankly awfully elephant-faced dude which hands down is the shittiest effects make up this side of Carl Weathers trying to hide his actual arm behind some noodles and ketchup in a sleeveless vest, having come off worse in a game of Hide and Seek with a Predator. Plus he’s called Nesh which apparently is short for Ganesh which is about as dumb as a post. Post-like in its dumbness. Super special mention for the random Terry Gilliam cameo and reference to form 27b/6. I can’t help thinking that if Gilliam had directed this;  

1. there would have been roughly 400% more little people in it, and   
2. I wouldn’t have given two finely crafted shits that it made no sense.

Hell, I’d have thrown money at it.